Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 425 S. University Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 425 S. University Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Cognition. 2018 Jun;175:36-52. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.011. Epub 2018 Feb 17.
A crucial component of event recognition is understanding event roles, i.e. who acted on whom: boy hitting girl is different from girl hitting boy. We often categorize Agents (i.e. the actor) and Patients (i.e. the one acted upon) from visual input, but do we rapidly and spontaneously encode such roles even when our attention is otherwise occupied? In three experiments, participants observed a continuous sequence of two-person scenes and had to search for a target actor in each (the male/female or red/blue-shirted actor) by indicating with a button press whether the target appeared on the left or the right. Critically, although role was orthogonal to gender and shirt color, and was never explicitly mentioned, participants responded more slowly when the target's role switched from trial to trial (e.g., the male went from being the Patient to the Agent). In a final experiment, we demonstrated that this effect cannot be fully explained by differences in posture associated with Agents and Patients. Our results suggest that extraction of event structure from visual scenes is rapid and spontaneous.
事件识别的一个关键组成部分是理解事件角色，即谁对谁采取了行动：男孩打女孩与女孩打男孩是不同的。我们通常根据视觉输入对主体（即行动者）和客体（即被行动者）进行分类，但即使我们的注意力被其他事物占据，我们是否能够快速而自发地编码这种角色呢？在三个实验中，参与者观察了连续的两人场景序列，并在每个场景中通过按钮按下指示目标主体（男性/女性或红/蓝衬衫主体）是否出现在左侧或右侧来搜索目标。至关重要的是，尽管角色与性别和衬衫颜色是正交的，并且从未被明确提及，但当目标的角色在试验之间切换时，参与者的反应会变慢（例如，男性从客体变成了主体）。在最后的实验中，我们证明了这一效应不能完全用与主体和客体相关的姿势差异来解释。我们的结果表明，从视觉场景中提取事件结构是快速而自发的。
